On Radio

One thing that has become clear to me as I have been driving back and forth between home and work is the fact that radio has now become extremely crappy. Unbearably bad, actually. If you spend any amount of time listening to a particular radio station, it will quickly become apparent that the DJs don’t have access to more than six or seven songs, which must be played over and over again each day. Occasionally they will sub in an older song or two, but mostly it will be that same half a dozen repeated continually over the course of the day. Whether or not the songs are actually entertaining does not seem to factor into which songs get played.

As if that repetition wasn’t bad enough, there are commercials. Said commercials are fine in concept; I mean, radio’s got to survive somehow, and I don’t mind the occasional ad here and there. The problem starts to come in when you have enough time to compare the length of the song time and the time the ads take up. In a good form of media, the amount of actual entertainment has more air time than the ads. This situation, unfortunately, is not how radio chooses to go about it. I’d say the amount of songs and the amount of commercials are about even, but I have a creeping suspicion that the ads are steadily getting longer while the songs get shorter. The final straw, of course, is the fact that the ads are almost as repetitive as the songs, which all combines to give me the feeling that I am stuck reliving the same drive again and again. Not a pleasant sensation.

Of course, the fact that one of the commercials is paid for by the state of Texas to encourage breastfeeding does not lessen my displeasure. Seriously, if I hear that “Healthy Baby, Healthy Mama jingle one more time, I may end up going crazy from the sheer combination of awkwardness, annoyance, and anger at their attempt at clumsy social engineering. I mean, if you’re going to try and program people, at least try to be subtle at it! Bah!